I just want to touch on a couple of points raised early in this thread.

Historically speaking, all science originally began as philosophy. Over the past several millenia, philosophical debate about the nature of things turned up answers to philosophical questions. These 'answers' then broke away from philosophy and formed into various branches of science and art. It could be argued that this 'evolution of thought' is part of a wider evolutionary process.

There have been two very interesting books written in recent years to address the phenomenon of spiritual belief.

'God's Debris', written by Scott Addams, creator of the Dilbert series of comics, is available as a free PDF download (easily found by Googling it). It's a very enjoyable read that asks more questions than it answers.

'The God Part of the Brain' is another (I forget the author's name) takes a very interesting view that 'God exists' in a physiological sense in the same way that 'music exists'. Both are ubiquitous and universal across cultures and epochs, and neuroscience can now actually pinpoint the regions in the brain that are stimulated by both. More interestingly, the parts of the brain that are stimulated by music and spirituality are the 'pleasure zones' (for wont of the proper scientific name) -- the very same receptors that respond to eating and sex or, in other words, the receptors that are responsible for survival of species.

It should also be noted that the current academic zietgeist is one of a post-modernist making. Words like 'universals' and 'truth' are regarded by many these days as meaningless. This is interesting because truth, for example, exists on a truth - fallacy continuum. If there is no truth then, by extension, lies can't exist. "There were no weapons of mass destruction." The statement is meaningless unless truth exists.

Anyway, this is an interesting thread and I hope I haven't treaded on the toes of anybody who might have a different viewpoint to mine.

anonymouse